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To: Les H who wrote (45229)	3/8/2025 2:44:25 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 49047

Nine Warning Signs Were Missed by Israel Before Oct. 7. So Whose Job Is on the Line Next? This week, Netanyahu finally downed his first culprit, as IDF chief Halevi's resignation came into effect. While Halevi's first to speak with the hostages' families, Netanyahu keeps himself busy by trying to decide on his next victim – Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar or Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara Haaretz The massacre exposed the extent of the difficulties inherent in Israel's defensive conception, which relied on limited manpower along the border. Many of the battalions were "siphoned away" for the defense of settlements in the West Bank and along the 1967 border, accompanied by slashes in the army's reserve forces. In the absence of sufficient forces along the border, in view of the terrorist armies that developed in Lebanon and Gaza, there was a growing blind faith in the army that military intelligence would provide warnings. These were expected to arrive in time and provide a window of opportunity for deploying further forces and raise the level of alert among the existing defense forces. The warning never came – even though Halevi and Bar discussed with their people possible signs of a border incident in the hours preceding the attack – and the result was a disastrous failure. Since the Hamas attack, the public in Israel has learned mainly about the activated SIM cards, the chief intelligence sign identified in the Gaza Strip on the night between October 6 and 7, a sign that could have indicated the enemy's intentions. The Shin Bet investigation shows that on that night, 45 Israeli SIM cards were activated in phones belonging to Hamas operatives. One night, exactly a year before that, 38 SIM cards were activated, and during the month of Ramadan, in April 2023, 37 such cards were activated. In the two earlier cases, it turned out to have been an exercise. Hamas purchased those SIM cards so that its fighters could communicate through Israeli networks in the event of an attack inside Israeli territory, and with the idea (that was realized) that they could use these cards to broadcast live videos with footage of the attack. Monitoring these SIM cards was part of a brilliant Shin Bet operation that was designed to give Israel a high-quality advance warning regarding operational preparations by Hamas (personally, I would like to know whether the planners had watched the third season of the wonderful TV series "The Wire;" (those interested should watch episodes 7 and 8). But the rest is known. The significance of activating the SIM cards on that fateful night was obscured by a host of baseless claims regarding the organization's unwillingness to launch a war. Since then, two or three additional signs that amassed that night have been noted, but misinterpreted. The true story is even more dismal. When combining the findings of all these investigations, it turns out that various organizations had detected no less than nine indicative signs, which had started accumulating in the days preceding October 7. Not only were these omens not addressed appropriately in real time, they were also not brought to the attention of Halevi and Zamir, then the director general of the defense ministry, in discussions held a few hours before the massacre. There are also some reservations regarding the way the three signs that were passed along were reported.

To: Les H who wrote (45229)	3/9/2025 9:00:50 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 49047

China’s Autonomous Agent, Manus, Changes Everything By Craig S. Smith, Contributor. Craig S. Smith, Eye on AI host and former NYT writer, covers AI. Mar 08, 2025, 03:29pm EST The Second DeepSeek Moment In late 2023, the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model designed to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, was described as China’s ‘ Sputnik moment’ for AI. It was the first tangible sign that the country’s researchers were closing the gap in large language model (LLM) capabilities. But Manus represents something entirely different—it is not just another model. It is an agent, an AI system that thinks, plans, and executes tasks independently, capable of navigating the real world as seamlessly as a human intern with an unlimited attention span. This is what sets Manus apart from its Western counterparts. While ChatGPT-4 and Google’s Gemini rely on human prompts to guide them, Manus doesn’t wait for instructions. Instead, it is designed to initiate tasks on its own, assess new information, and dynamically adjust its approach. It is, in many ways, the first true general AI agent. For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn’t just rank candidates; it reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross-references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision—complete with an Excel sheet it generated on its own. When given a vague command like “find me an apartment in San Francisco,” it goes beyond listing search results—it considers crime statistics, rental trends, even weather patterns, and delivers a shortlist of properties tailored to the user’s unstated preferences. Forbes ------------------- Another Chinese company rattles Silicon Valley, Manus AI stuns tech world with DeepSeek-level performance in complex task handling; is AGI closer than we think? Read more at: economictimes.indiatimes.com